5476 Miles design and progress

As the summer of social solitude and lazy content crawls to its slow, reluctant death, suffocated by a pillow of work and responsibility, you may be left thinking "Terry, where's your latest animation that I've really been looking forward to for all this time?(and what nice imagery you've used there)". Well, ideal person who cares about my animation, I didn't finish it in time because making a 4 minute video made entirely of paper is more work than I had anticipated.

So, after much cutting of paper (and metaphorical wrists) I came very close to being ready to start the animation. Animation, you know, that bit that people think is the slow and boring bit? The bit that would (will) only really involve sliding bits of paper around? It turns out that's the quick and fun bit when doing a paper animation, because that's not the bit where you spend hours or days on a piece only to realise it's a small section of a scene that's in shot for just a couple of seconds.

With that in mind I would say that making an entire 4 minute video out of paper is too much for one person to do in a reasonable amount of time, which is why it's coming up to around a year and a half since I drew up the first storyboard, and although it's looking like it's going to be my greatest creative venture to date; in terms of making entire paper videos this will probably turn out to be the last of any.

Design

So, to show that I have actually been working on it over the summer (and to flesh out this blog a little bit more) I thought I'd go through the design process and the cutting (so much cutting, I actually started to injure my hand from using the craft knife for too long), with lots of pretty pictures.

Cut out lots of tiny bird shapes? Flock off.

Those birds were made by using a hole puncher and then cutting out tiny bird shapes with some nail scissors.

The eyes look a bit funny, so I won't draw attention to them by writing about them in the caption.

So, when designing the bits to cut out I drew a sketch first to work out the size and the separate shapes to cut out then did the cutting by eye, later I discovered tracing paper and traced my sketches and just cut along the lines (genius).

The streetlamp is from an arty night scene.

Yes, that's a cow.

As you can see I didn't always make the cut out exactly like the sketch, using it as a guideline and applying a little artistic license.

 For the flight of the birds, I had 2 different basic wing shapes which would (will) be replaced during animation (see animation test a bit further below).

(Just about) Finished bits

Some finished paper bits.

Heart of butterflies

Balloon scene before I'd finished the balloon.

I told you I'd come up with something for the sea bit (see storyboard post)

To give you an idea of scale, the blue background is an A1 sheet, so there won't be that much in the frame at one time because the base of my animation rostrum is a bit smaller than A3.

Animation tests

I've done a small amount of animation when testing concepts and here they are:

Before I cut the circles from the hole puncher into bird shapes.

Testing some eye movements, a vital and amusing part of the singing in music videos.

1st: each frame is a unique wing piece, 2nd: every other frame is a unique wing piece and the wing is moved slightly on the second frame it appears.

I hope I didn't give too much of a miserable impression because I'm actually really excited to get the result of the finished video because in my opinion it'll be my best yet (and should be after this amount of time) and if not then probably the artiest but certainly the paperiest, unfortunately you'll just have to wait a little bit longer to see it.

(psst... if you click on the pictures you can view a larger version, just so you know...)